# xGen-MM-Vid (BLIP-3-Video): You Only Need 32 Tokens to Represent a Video Even in VLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16267/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 46 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [LLaMA-VID: An Image is Worth 2 Tokens in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17043/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [PLLaVA : Parameter-free LLaVA Extension from Images to Videos for Video Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16994/) (2024)
- [OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16527/) (2023)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [A Simple LLM Framework for Long-Range Video Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17235/) (2023)
- [Building and better understanding vision-language models: insights and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12637/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01258/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [DyCoke: Dynamic Compression of Tokens for Fast Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15024/) (2024)
- [STORM: Token-Efficient Long Video Understanding for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04130/) (2025)
- [InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive: A Comprehensive Multimodal System for Long-term Streaming Video and Audio Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09596/) (2024)
- [VideoHallu: Evaluating and Mitigating Multi-modal Hallucinations on Synthetic Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01481/) (2025)
- [InstructSeg: Unifying Instructed Visual Segmentation with Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14006/) (2024)
- [Multi-Granular Spatio-Temporal Token Merging for Training-Free Acceleration of Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07990/) (2025)
- [SlowFast-LLaVA-1.5: A Family of Token-Efficient Video Large Language Models for Long-Form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18943/) (2025)
- [Active Video Perception: Iterative Evidence Seeking for Agentic Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05774/) (2025)
- [Eyes Wide Open: Ego Proactive Video-LLM for Streaming Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14560/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-Scissor: Token Compression with Semantic Connected Components for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21862/) (2025)
- [PVC: Progressive Visual Token Compression for Unified Image and Video Processing in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09613/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Token Compression for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20198/) (2025)
- [LinVT: Empower Your Image-level Large Language Model to Understand Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05185/) (2024)
- [VideoAutoArena: An Automated Arena for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Video Analysis through User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13281/) (2024)
- [Plug-and-Play 1.x-Bit KV Cache Quantization for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16257/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-Octopus: Unlocking Instruction-Driven Adaptive Projector Fusion for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05067/) (2025)
- [freePruner: A Training-free Approach for Large Multimodal Model Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15446/) (2024)
- [ActionArt: Advancing Multimodal Large Models for Fine-Grained Human-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18152/) (2025)
- [DisTime: Distribution-based Time Representation for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24329/) (2025)
- [DynTok: Dynamic Compression of Visual Tokens for Efficient and Effective Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03990/) (2025)
- [Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03501/) (2025)
- [VTok: A Unified Video Tokenizer with Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04202/) (2026)
- [Video-Based Reward Modeling for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10178/) (2026)
- [VisCoP: Visual Probing for Video Domain Adaptation of Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13808/) (2025)
- [NOAH: Benchmarking Narrative Prior driven Hallucination and Omission in Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06475/) (2025)
- [Compression Tells Intelligence: Visual Coding, Visual Token Technology, and the Unification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20742/) (2026)
- [HiVid-Narrator: Hierarchical Video Narrative Generation with Scene-Primed ASR-anchored Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07366/) (2026)
- [Tracing the Arrow of Time: Diagnosing Temporal Information Flow in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07568/) (2026)
- [Allocate Before You Embed: Adaptive Visual Input Allocation for Video Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01778/) (2026)
- [TOC-Bench: A Temporal Object Consistency Benchmark for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09904/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present xGen-MM-Vid (BLIP-3-Video): a multimodal language model for videos, particularly designed to efficiently capture temporal information over multiple frames. BLIP-3-Video takes advantage of the 'temporal encoder' in addition to the conventional visual tokenizer, which maps a sequence of tokens over multiple frames into a compact set of visual tokens. This enables BLIP3-Video to use much fewer visual tokens than its competing models (e.g., 32 vs. 4608 tokens). We explore different types of temporal encoders, including learnable spatio-temporal pooling as well as sequential models like Token Turing Machines. We experimentally confirm that BLIP-3-Video obtains video question-answering accuracies comparable to much larger state-of-the-art models (e.g., 34B), while being much smaller (i.e., 4B) and more efficient by using fewer visual tokens. The project website is at https://www.salesforceairesearch.com/opensource/xGen-MM-Vid/index.html